Many wireless devices include Global Positioning Systems (GPS) receivers to receive high frequency signals from GPS satellites. High frequency satellite signals may be used by a GPS receiver to identify a geographic location of the receiver by decoding the signals and calculating a distance to the satellites based on a strength and/or a propagation time of the received signals. The geographic location may include latitude, longitude, and/or altitude. A wireless device may use geographic location information from the GPS receiver in navigation applications, mapping applications, emergency location applications, and/or social media applications.
Currently, GPS-related applications operated on a wireless device may have to send requests for geographic locations of other wireless devices and/or points of interest through a cellular communication network to access a database of stored geographic locations. For example, a wireless device operating a mapping application may send a query for coffee shops with wireless local area networks within a half mile radius of the wireless device. To receive the geographic location of the coffee shops, the wireless device transmits its geographic location to the mapping application, which then accesses a database to determine coffee shops with network access points within a half mile of the provided geographic location. The mapping application may then transmit a list of matching coffee shops with approximately matching geographic locations. However, in some instances, a wireless device may not be able to communicate with a network through cellular communication channels (e.g., from signal degradation or network traffic congestion in urban environments). In these instances, a wireless device may not be able communicate with a network to obtain geographic locations of points of interest.